Spitsbergen

It is hard to imagine that when I was 26 years of age, in 1983, along with a few friends, we arranged a two month sea kayaking trip to Svalbard. The plan was to paddle the whole of the west coast of Spitsbergen, a distance of over 600 nautical miles, when the out and back mileage was taken into account.
This was in the days before Svalbard had hit the tourist radar. Very few people managed to visit this lonely northern archipelago, in the last 4 weeks we only saw one other person and was briefly for a few minutes when he landed his helicopter! We didn’t even see any boats or ships in the distance.
The costs were quite phenomenal for the time and without considerable support from family and friends we would never have raised the amount of money required to put on such a trip. We had to ship out our kayaks, equipment and all our food. The price of flights was astronomical, I have paid less this morning to book flights to northern Norway in July 2018 than my flights cost in 1983.
Without doubt though this was one of the defining periods in my life, we had to be totally self sufficient, there was no satellite phone, GPS etc but we did need really powerful rifles as protection against the polar bears, which inhabit the region. One of us had tuition in how to stitch wounds, although the thought of letting somebody near us with a needle filled us with dread.
These are a few of the pictures taken in this arctic outpost over 34 years ago. Apologies for the quality of some of the scans from my old slides.

Whilst sea kayaking off the west coast the scenery was particularly dramatic. It doesn’t matter how many photographs you see, nothing can prepare you for the first time you paddle past an ice front.Conditions were not always co-operative. We were aiming to camp near the approaching headland. On most paddling days we spent about 8 hours on the water so it was always a pleasure to get the tents up and some warm food inside us on days like this one.In 1926 Roald Amundsen left from this tower, in Ny Alesund, in his airship “Norge” for his flight over the North Pole. The other interesting thing about Ny Alesund is that it has the world’s most northern post office and we were able to pick up some mail.It was rare that we were able to stand around camp without full protective clothing on, but on this particularly still morning towards the north of Spitsbergen Dave is looking at the freshly fallen snow on the mountains behind.After a great day of sea kayaking there is nothing more risky than jumping from one ice floe to another whilst wearing fleece trousers.In totally remote areas there is nobody to see you, when you decide to wander around on a glacier, whilst wearing wellingtons. You might not get away with this level of equipment on Mt Blanc!Heading back into Longyearbyen towards the end of August, we had been in Svalbard for over 2 months and as the first of the winter snows fell we knew that it was time to head south to the warmer waters of Jersey.

About Sea Paddler

The Sea Paddler website has been in existence in various forms since 1996. Initially as a site which provide a large amount of information about general sea kayaking. From about 2008 it functioned as a blog and now the aim is to provide a mixture of the two.
The focus was on sea kayaking in Jersey but has expanded into other geographical areas and different activities.

Recent Posts

Previous Posts

Categories

Error: Access Token is not valid or has expired. Feed will not update. This error message is only visible to WordPress admins

There's an issue with the Instagram Access Token that you are using. Please obtain a new Access Token on the plugin's Settings page.If you continue to have an issue with your Access Token then please see this FAQ for more information.